Full Description
Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using "global ethnography" and "hidden histories" as the keys to social discovery. Kalb's anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the "anthropology of global systems", financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and "moral anthropology", among others.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Part I: Foundations
Introduction: Webs of Life versus Webs of Meaning: Or how I Became a Marxist Anthropologist
Chapter 1. No Outside? Then What? For a Dialectical "Value Regime"
Part II: Living Labor, Value, and Worthlessness
Chapter 2. "Worthless Poles" and other Postsocialist Devaluations: Conversations with a Polish Populist
Chapter 3. "It is my history and it is worthless": Gender and the Making of Philipsism, The Netherlands
Chapter 4. Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: Two Stories and a Marxian Reflection
Part III: The Non-Surprise of the Populist Right
Chapter 5. Theory from the East: Class without Class and the Making of the Illiberal Right in Eastern Europe
Chapter 6. Double Devaluations: The Making of the Populist Right in the Global North
Part IV: Global Middle Classness: Living and Dreaming
Chapter 7. "Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen": In the Romanian Bubble of Outsourced Creativity
Chapter 8. The "Global Middle Class": A Seductive but Empty Signifier
Part V: Finance and Hegemonic Decline
Chapter 9. Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global System
Chapter 10. Two Theories of Money: A Historical Anthropology of the State-Finance Nexus for Present Purposes
Part VI. Polemics for a Reason
Chapter 11. Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the Centennial of the Russian Revolution
Chapter 12. The Labor Theory of Value and the Value Theory of Labor
Epilogue: Why I Will not Make it as a Moral Anthropologist
Index
